Exploring Visual Anthropology: Socially Engaged Art Lab Tour

Collaborative research design requires participants to arrive with inputs that make conversation possible, not just being brought together. The process took 10 months and required time to arrive at the right inputs. What mattered most was being clear about outcomes rather than specific agendas. Meetings needed to end with clear next steps specifying who was doing what and by when. Positionality documents are not just glossaries of terms but ways of naming where researchers are looking from, how they understand transformation, and therefore how they will interpret research findings. Collaborative research is not only about agreeing on questions, methods, or instruments but also about making explicit the lens in which knowledge is produced and interpreted. Networks need more than moments of connection; they need the discipline to turn connection into shared lessons, shared language, and shared responsibility for the knowledge to be produced.

Effective research requires collaborative protocol development involving academics, local communities, and administrative bodies. This includes co-construction of research protocols, community involvement in implementation, ethical compliance, result sharing, and communication. The process should be iterative, allowing for reformulation based on community feedback.

The research protocol developed by Plan Común involved a structured approach to collaborative investigation: (1) identifying potential strategies, (2) discussing and refining these strategies, (3) producing written texts documenting the findings, and (4) translating these texts into graphical representations. This protocol was designed to be efficient and reproducible, allowing the office to generate a catalog of 44 strategies and prototypes that could potentially be applied in various contexts. The emphasis on textual articulation before graphical production reflects a commitment to rigorous conceptual development.

Protocol development is inherently collaborative, requiring input from principal investigators, team members, and sometimes external stakeholders. Statistical methods must be specified from the outset to guide data collection decisions. Beyond traditional sections, advanced protocols should include pre-populated results tables, discussion outlines assuming positive findings, and comprehensive reference lists formatted from the beginning. This comprehensive approach transforms protocol writing into manuscript preparation, saving substantial time later. The collaborative nature of protocol development ensures practical feasibility and leverages diverse expertise throughout the research team.

A research protocol is a comprehensive action plan describing all steps for conducting scientific studies, serving as an organizational tool that systematically explains how research will be conducted. Key characteristics include: (1) Written in future tense since it describes future actions, excluding results, discussions, and conclusions; (2) Must demonstrate validity by detailing variables and measurement instruments; (3) Requires theoretical foundation based on existing knowledge about the topic. Protocols serve essential functions including formulating research problems, compiling previous work, defining hypotheses and objectives, establishing methodology, and discussing requirements and limitations. Correct protocol design prevents errors leading to invalid conclusions.

Artistic research is a methodology where artists conduct systematic investigations using artistic practices to generate knowledge, characterized by an epistemological drive toward understanding, knowledge formulation within specific art forms, collaborative research processes, and peer review by fellow artists rather than art historians or critics. This approach differs from traditional scientific research by emphasizing embodied, process-oriented inquiry where artistic production itself constitutes the research output, allowing for representation through diverse media beyond text-based formats.

Art as research represents a paradigm shift viewing artistic practice as legitimate scholarly inquiry. This approach encompasses visual, literary, performative, and digital arts, interrogating ethics and pedagogy while examining arts sustainability amid globalization. The methodology positions art as both research and pedagogic tool, challenging traditional distinctions between creation and investigation. Key themes include methodological deliberations, ethical considerations, and experimental engagement with research questions through creative means.

Artistic research is distinguished from other fields of inquiry by two core characteristics. First, artistic research employs a research process executed through the making of work—paintings, sculptures, films, art propositions, events, photographs, sonic and performance activities. It is therefore practice-based. Second, such research is discovery-led rather than hypothesis-driven. Unlike much research in the dominant scientific tradition, artistic research emerges from engagements with materials, professional practices, and real-world problems. The researcher subordinates all operations to the sensible conditions of intuition and construction, which are core to artistic research. This nomadic conception of science, as identified by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, distinguishes it from institutionalized or 'royal science' closely associated with the state and corporatist interests.

Christopher Friling distinguished between three key prepositions in art research: 'research to art,' 'research through art,' and 'research for art.' Research to art involves systematic disciplinary inquiry similar to scientific research, which Friling was not primarily interested in. Research through art is research that leads to the production of art and embodies the research itself. Research for art is lowercase 'searching' that is free from strict scientific methodologies. The term 'embodies' is crucial because it suggests that knowledge exists in various forms within or as art itself.

Art can be understood as a form of research and investigation. The artist describes their work as an 'onderzoek' (research) into the existence of objects and realities. This perspective positions artistic practice not merely as creation but as a systematic inquiry into fundamental questions about existence, perception, and reality.

Decolonizing methodologies is an approach to research that challenges the colonial foundations of academic research by recognizing indigenous knowledge systems, prioritizing community relationships over individual gain, and reframing research as a tool for indigenous self-determination rather than exploitation; this approach emphasizes that research must be conducted with permission, for the benefit of the researched community, and within frameworks that honor indigenous epistemologies and cultural protocols.

Walking serves as an indigenous research method for knowledge sharing and culture mapping, embodying experiences to understand the world rather than treating environments as static objects. Fieldwork should document not just technical data but researchers' feelings, thoughts, discomforts, uncertainties, and observations. This creates embodied decolonial encounters. Researchers should walk in pairs for solidarity and safety, respect spatial sanctity, and explicitly include themselves in the work rather than presenting as separate observers. Organizations should develop community manifestos guiding relationships with reciprocity, questioning power structures, and asking whether interventions are truly needed or beneficial before proceeding.

This section examines how gender analysis reproduces colonial categories and epistemic violence. White feminism challenged masculine science with epistemicide against women labeled as witches, but hegemonic gender analysis focuses narrowly on women and girls, missing community relationships. Standpoint theory faces critique from Black feminists who note mixed-race women's standpoint has prevailed. Juder Espinosa argues gender is a colonial category reproducing racism. Linta Tuji notes 'research' is a dirty word in indigenous vocabularies because peoples were studied like animals for dispossession. Even qualitative research reproduces positivism. Decolonial research requires asking who is researching and for what purpose, recognizing research time differs from community time. There is no recipe for decolonial research, but key principles include: collective research over individual solitary work; avoiding tokenistic intersectionality; and recognizing that those with class privilege versus those without inhabit different worlds. Orlando Fals Borda embodies sentipensante truth—thinking while feeling and feeling while thinking. Amphibious knowledge combines reason with feeling, producing empathetic knowledge that learns by acting and acts by learning, breaking from classical social sciences imagining intellectuals outside society.

Indigenous and Black feminist scholarship demonstrates decolonial methodologies challenging hegemonic research paradigms. Paulina Fiodorov, a Sami theater director and filmmaker, calls out logging industry injustices affecting reindeer herding lands and river ecosystems, using artistic methods to advocate for indigenous feminism and ancestral livelihoods. Daria Grard, a Greenlandic researcher at Copenhagen University, employs auto-reflexive arts-based approaches to unsettle research, examining Danish colonial sterilization policies that forced women to be non-reproductive to diminish their numbers. Margaret Amaka Ohanyi, a Black scholar in Poland, practices Black feminism in peripheral academia, facing isolation while advocating for Black communities. Jarak, a Ghana-Italian writer, analyzes structural racism and colonial stereotypes in Italian collective imaginary through intersectional frameworks. Bruna Christina Jako Pera, a Brazilian researcher in Spain, applies intersectional perspectives to gender-based violence against women from racial and ethnic minorities. These scholars demonstrate how decolonial and intersectional methodologies challenge who produces knowledge and whose voices are centered in academic discourse.

Decolonial resistance in research requires transforming methodologies that perpetuate epistemological violence. This transformation involves recognizing how Western research historically justified colonial exploitation, understanding positionality as neither insider nor outsider, and rejecting transactional engagement for genuine relational practice. Talanoa exemplifies this approach through empathy, embodiment, relationality, and reciprocity, prioritizing dialogue process over predetermined outcomes. Before engaging, practitioners must deeply understand participants' cultural contexts and follow their cognitive journeys. This paradigm shift moves research from extraction toward mutual learning, honoring participants' humanity and building trust essential for ethical scholarship.